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CSE 2221 Placement Test

CSE2221 covers “intellectual foundations of software engineering; design-by-contract principles; mathematical modeling of software functionality; component-based software from client perspective; layered data representation.” The CSE2221 Placement Exam is designed to assess a student’s readiness for these topics using brief hand-written programs or program segments. This is a placement exam; no credit is awarded. Find complete details about the placement exam on the Department of Computer Science and Engineering’s website.

Special Note

Satisfactory performance on the placement exam for CSE 2221 fulfills the prerequisite requirements for CSE 2221. Satisfactory performance on the placement exam for CSE 2221 does not result in academic credit for CSE 1223.  

Placement Test Topics

  • Variables, types, expressions, and assignment statements
  • Fundamental or built-in types for working with integer-, real-, Boolean-, character-, and text-valued data
  • Simple input from a keyboard or a file, and simple output to a monitor or a file
  • Conditional control structures such as “if” and “if-else”
  • Iterative control structures such as “while”

Programming Language

  • Students will be asked to write, as a paper-and-pencil exercise, short programs or program segments. 
  • Students may write their answers using any programming language they know well.  However, experience shows that students who know only the BASIC programming language, or its visual variants, often are not well prepared for the CSE Placement Exam.

Sample Question

Write a program, in a programming language of your choice, that repeatedly prompts a user to input a positive integer value. At any point, if the user enters 0 or a negative integer value, then the program should print the minimum of all of the positive integer values entered by the user, and then terminate execution. For example, if a user enters the values 4 13 8 11 2 66 5 0, then the program should report that the smallest of the positive values entered is 2. Program output should include appropriate user-friendly headings.

Test Scheduling

The one-hour exam may be scheduled online through the University Testing Center: